Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners

Edited by Robert Dewhurst, Joshua Beckman, and CAConrad

Wave Books, 2015

I am coeditor, with Joshua Beckman and CAConrad, of Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners, published by Wave Books in October 2015. The first new edition of Wieners’s poems in thirty years, Supplication gathers work by this most significant poet of the Black Mountain and Beat generation. It includes the full text of the 1958 edition of his influential The Hotel Wentley Poems, plus poems from rare sources, facsimiles, notes, and collages by Wieners.

Reviews

John Wieners may have been our great unknown poet of supreme holy love and terror. Wave Books’ Supplication is more than a rediscovery—it’s a major poetic event that we should, all of us, be grateful for.

An important volume, one that should place Wieners back into the canon of twentieth-century American poetic innovation . . . Supplication ends the posthumous era of exile for this misunderstood poet, steadying a flame of aesthetic devotion and poetic deviance for the audiences he long imagined.

Supplication doesn’t come as a correction of the Black Sparrow Selected so much as a refinement. It offers a slimmer stack of poems, yet somehow feels more generous . . . Even these decades later, Wieners’s poems — so fresh and fluid, lurid, and luminous — still feel too vital to leave behind.

Noted

The Hotel Wentley poems are nested in here, and they are the most grandly erotic and heartfelt homosexual sketches about living out of time in friendship on the edge, and seeing the whole trembling picture of midcentury America from there.